Henry Adams's Conceptual Technique

...This would add a final dimension to the work of giving Adams his full legitimacy in our cultural history...

...The Chartres apse, enormous in size and width, is exquisitely lighted...

...I would say that a major key to the difficulty in reading Adams is to be found at the immediate level of sentence-structure...

...Much has been made of a fatiguingly persistent use of irony and paradox throughout Adams's work, but I wonder if this feature might not be better understood simply in terms of compositional technique: a fairly intricate contrapuntal construction which makes for close texture and requires a sustained plateau of attention...

...Or take the shenanigans of Jim Fisk...

...About the only American family that ever came anywhere near meeting these conditions and knowing how to act them out was the Adamses...

...One sees this even in the Adams of 22: Reacting to the revolution in Sicily in terms not only of itself but also of the American Revolution, he concluded (quite correctly) that Europe, for all its wisdom, had a great deal to learn about running efficient uprisings...

...He was rather annoyed that Garibaldi should be called the "George Washington of Italy...

...It should, however, be safe to say that Henry Adams—for whatever reasons—was in certain respects the most complete intellectual America ever produced...

...Let it be stated as dogma that there were few if any problems taken up by Adams simply as passive objects of contemplation...

...since Washington himself would never have dreamed of invading another province in a red fireman's shirt, and in that perception there is a world of cultural significance...

...The proof of the strategy is quite pragmatic: It explains more paradoxes in the architecture—problems of a complex technical nature—than any other approach one could imagine...

...The other striking feature of Adams's work—a technique of analysis so organic as to disappear as ornament and reappear simply as method—is the technique of metaphor...

...Whether or not this approach (the sociology, as it were, of being an Adams) is the best way to account for the "educating" of Henry Adams, remains something of a question...

...University of Chicago In certain English families, it has been possible for exceptional qualities of intellect to perpetuate themselves from generation to generation...

...Add to all this a persistent moral scrupulosity sustained by Low Church, and the result has been a remarkable attitude of class exclusive-ness and a set of class standards having nothing to do with "aristocracy" in the usual sense...

...Out of this he evolved the habit of polarizing much of what he saw in the one culture with something comparable in the other...

...We have been getting hints, for much too long a time now, that one of our most distinguished scholar-critics, R. P. Blackmur, is some day to give us a critical study of Henry Adams...

...On a more diffuse level, but quite as effective in its way, is the great scene at Mont-Saint-Michel where William's men gather on the eve of the Duke's campaign in Brittany: There, as Taillefer performs the Chanson de Roland, we are made to understand the "masculine and military passions of the Archangel Michael...

...The technique of "polarization," as I have called it—by which I mean a kind of double vision of everything, an instinctive contrasting of every perception with its opposite or its obverse, a running comparative method which exhibits both what a thing is and what it isn't—this habit seems to have developed originally out of Adams's basic awareness from the very first that, though intrepidly American to the last, he was more or less suspended between two cultures all of the time...

...The Virgin herself saw to the lighting of her own boudoir...

...Perhaps, in leaving the point, it might be added that the cutting edge of Adams's language lies to some extent in the very use of words that violate—just a little—our settled patterns of thought: e.g., Jefferson's "greed for land," or the apsidal chapels at Le Mans "carried to fanaticism...

...It is recognized both in science and in art that these conceptual fictions can take on lives of their own, but Adams assumed (and Whitehead has said much the same thing) that they can have an order of reality just as high, or just as low, as tact and taste see fit to place them...

...In it, one gets a sense of the enormous range of things that to Adams were eligible to be addressed as problems, including, for example, land and naval warfare and the investment of money—matters which have seldom fully engaged the resources of our most cosmopolitan minds...

...The quality that comes through this sampling, and which deserves some comment on technical grounds if on no other, is an unusual efficiency and precision of intellectual method...

...By this I mean a taking for granted that the thinker is entitled, with the use of symbolic analogy, to impose unity and consistency on every object of inquiry for his own ultimate enlightenment...

...Two of those dimensions have been well blocked in already by Elizabeth Stevenson—first with her biography, and now with her fascinating Henry Adams Reader...

...I would not labor this notion if it were not that Adams's habit of conceptualizing things dialectically got itself built into the actual workmanship of Adams's prose...

...One thing that made them so vulnerable was their excruciatingly un-American quality: The Erie banditti established themselves in a palace, where Fisk produced opera and supported a harem...

...The highest type of practical statesmanship must always take this direction...

...Indeed, almost all Adams's subjects find themselves being polarized sooner or later with something else: Boston and Quincy, Massachusetts and Virginia, Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres, 12th century and 20th, Toussaint l'Ouverture and Napoleon (a potent item in Napoleon's will to crush Toussaint lay in the fact that the latter's career was "a sort of Negro travesty" on his own...

...For an explanation of this phenomenon, one may postulate either pure "breeding'' or a sociology of intellect in which family, a family seat, participation in certain high affairs, and modest affluence have all been important items both in sharpening talent and making for its continuity over time...

...I only raise the possibility...

...Let the point be suggested with a typical passage from the Gallatin: "In governments, as in households, he who holds the purse holds the power...

...Jefferson would have been helpless...

...The Treasury is the natural point of control to be occupied by any statesman who aims at organization or reform, and conversely no organization or reform is likely to succeed that does not begin with and is not guided by the Treasury...

...Elizabeth Stevenson's excellent new Henry Adams Reader, with the chance it offers for a sampling of the man's mind not to be gotten from any single work, even the Education, very much reinforces this conviction...

...Here, as everywhere throughout the church, the windows give the law, but here they actually take the place of law...

...Like Henry James, he not only had an early acquaintance with Europe but was able to take both Europe and America into his system without either one blotting out the other, and to turn the result to immense practical advantage...

...Americans find this a little hard to believe, and yet it has been pretty convincingly shown in the work of such scholars as Noel Annan that assertions about an English hereditary intellectual elite have really been quite well grounded in fact...

...This seems to me less a question of Adams's metaphysics than of his intellectual working habits...

...In this excerpt, incidentally, Adams's close textual commentary on the Chanson—as well as his handling, later on, of the rose symbolism of Chartres—anticipates the New Critcism by a good twenty years or more...

...The Reader should serve as a very effective pilot fuse for setting us off, as Miss Stevenson modestly hopes, "on a personal exploration of the wholes from which these mutilated parts were taken...

...contrary to a widespread heresy to that effect, he cared little about decorating an idea for its own sake (his diction is rather chaste) ; he was far more concerned with the way a thing worked, and this applied just as much to Chartres as to the Battle of Tippecanoe...

...5.00...

...His requirement, which seems to have been solved fairly early, was that of a basic posture of mind which should prove appropriate to matters so diverse as the chanson de geste, rigging the gold market, and how men would think a century in the future...

...Washington and Jefferson doubtless stand pre-eminent as the representatives of what is best in our national character or its aspirations, but Washington depended mainly upon Hamilton, and without Gallatin Mr...

...I am struck by two aspects in particular: Adams's technique of automatic polarization of ideas, and his extension of metaphor into a working principle of explanation—features which seem to have had a profound influence on the very structure of all he thought and wrote...

...the gold conspiracy itself, in its very elaborateness, w^as "a transaction worthy of the French stage...

...Adams's greatest tour de force in this respect was his working conceit (for the sake of the problem) that it was the Virgin herself, in her womanly, queenly character, who domineered over the planning of Chartres...

...Even the most chance brushes between Europe and America, in Adams's mind, strike flashes of illumination—as when he observes that, if John Randolph had been an Italian, he would have passed for one possessed of the evil eye...

...In the Reader we have quite a spectrum: an early account of Adams's meeting with Garibaldi, his essay on John Smith, his piece on "Black Friday," chapters from his two novels, excerpts from the biographies of Gallatin and Randolph, from the History, from Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres, the remarkable letter from Samoa, and three of his speculative essays on science and thought...

...Outflanking the pedantries of Viollet-le-Duc regarding the irregularity of the apse windows was quite a stroke of generalship: "Any woman would see at once the secret of all this ingenuity and effort...